Senior Technical Program Manager - Backend Systems

Senior Technical Program Manager, Backend Systems

The team:

Like Jobber empowers small businesses with the tools and insights they need to succeed, our Systems engineering teams work to ensure our people at Jobber have the tooling, data and patterns needed to excel in our shared mission. The Technical Program Manager will be assigned to the internal focus area of Backend Foundations who support high leverage areas of our monolithic codebase, helping helps many teams unlock capabilities. TPMs at Jobber often work across teams and across business silos within Jobber, and we look for solutions that will drive success across the whole organization, not just within our teams.

The role: 

Reporting to the Director, Technical Product Management the Senior Technical Program Manager will drive discovery and support delivery of scalable backend systems. Within a rather wide technology and stakeholder domain we are looking for the TPM to prioritize creative, complex and impactful solutions while ensuring timely, high-quality delivery. This role requires strong leadership, excellent communication skills, and the ability to balance technical functionality with performance and maintainability. The Senior TPM will drive project outcomes, development and maintenance of clear roadmaps, and foster strong cross-functional relationships with senior stakeholders and Engineering Managers.

While the focus is usually tied to the initiatives going through their primary team this role often requires coordinating technical program delivery across cross-functional teams. Senior Technical Program Managers at Jobber are strategic thinkers with strong business acumen. More than delivering features, they aim to drive the business forward. 

As a Senior Technical Program Manager you will:

• Take on the responsibilities of a Scrum Team “Product Owner” for our in-house engineering teams. This includes executing the product management workflow, backlog management (writing and prioritizing Epics and Stories), participating in Scrum events (Sprint Planning, Sprints, Scrums, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives), estimation and testing.
• Be responsible for product vision and strategy. You will own the creative process of generating, developing, and curating new ideas. By understanding the connections between people’s day-to-day work, the overall company vision, and stakeholder needs, they can prioritize building what matters to achieve the company’s strategic goals and initiatives.
• Deliver features and technology solutions that make an impact on our internal teams. You’ll work collaboratively to prioritize work on the roadmap by ranking it against strategic goals and initiatives alongside leaders across the business.
• Build a plan, implement it, and then measure success. You’ll be responsible for a timeline for the implementation of new ideas, and then defining the release process and coordinating all activities to get a project launched. Once implemented, you will help determine what success looks like for the solutions you help build, measuring that success, and keeping stakeholders informed of that progress so that your team can make iterative decisions based on results.
• Be responsible for cross-functional program management. Help manage, and at times drive, complex cross-functional projects which require both technical and non-technical deliverables to come together within the broader domain you support. You will drive project planning and execution; provide proactive transparency to stakeholders (scope, status, risks and timelines); and support teams to help ensure timely delivery of their scope, including addressing blockers or issues that may arise.
• Uplevel the team. You are eager to influence and elevate the TPM team by educating, mentoring and training team members across the entire company on product methodology and philosophy.

To be successful, you should have:

• Career experience as a Technical Program Manager, Technical Product Manager, or similar role. A track record of building and shipping multiple products or technical solutions that have successfully delivered value. You’ve owned a complete product, or large parts of an offering, and are comfortable leading cross-functional teams. You have built up a diversity of experience through having supported a number of different teams, products, platforms or companies across your career journey thus far.
• Experience in SAAS business and an understanding of the basic SAAS metrics that lead to business success.
• Execution excellence. Creating insights is one thing – leading and driving execution is another. You are motivated by getting things across the finish line and have a solid track record of managing projects and multiple priorities at any given time.
• Next level communication skills. Your written and verbal communication skills help articulate the voice of the customer and the needs of the business. An ability to effectively tailor messaging to the right audience, from executive-level through to your direct teams, is critical.
• A shipping mindset. We don't believe in spending forever analyzing and debating. The best way to validate something is to ship it — so let's ship it, learn, and iterate.
• A data-driven mindset. You look to data to define a problem and you also look to data to prove your success. You are energized by the ability to contextualize your work through various tools, systems and processes.
• A strong technical background which enables you to engage with engineers about architecture and technical considerations that impact backend systems, and a desire to learn what you don’t know to help drive decision making.
• A knack for the details, with an understanding of the big picture. In your role, the details matter, and help drive your team forward with a sense of direction and clarity.
• Ownership. You are driven to do the right things for your work. You are accountable to both your successes and your shortcomings.